Understanding Biblical Slavery

A common yet asinine objection to the Bible that seems to survive and flourish in fallacious parts of the Internet is moral outrage over the fact that the Bible allows and codifies slavery.  Yes, I've dealt with this issue before on my blog, but I felt like writing about it again after brushing up against it once more.  What Biblical laws teach about slavery seems to relentlessly stir up controversy, moral indignation, and shock.

But let me point out a few details about what Old Testament laws say about slavery.

Mosaic Law inflexibly classifies kidnapping and slave trading--including either buying or selling slaves--as capital crimes (Exodus 21:16, Deuteronomy 24:7), prohibits returning runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15-16), calls for the release of slaves permanently injured by their masters (Exodus 21:26-27), demands punishment for masters who kill their slaves (Exodus 21:20-21), and says that slaves must be freed every seven years AND generously supplied with material goods as they leave (Exodus 21:2-6, Deuteronomy 15:12-15).  Also, the slavery of the Bible had nothing to do with the systematic oppression of a particular ethnic group or nationality.  As such, it had nothing to do with the type of slavery associated with early America, which involved nonconsensual relocation of blacks, horrendous mistreatment aboard the slave trading vessels, racial discrimination, and the denial of certain legal rights to slaves.  Atheist websites straw man Biblical slavery all the time by misrepresenting it quite drastically in order to inflame passions against it, yet those who have objectively analyzed Mosaic Law will know that the Old Testament does not teach an abusive form of slavery at all.

Honestly, anyone who thinks that the slavery of the Bible is identical to the slavery of past pagan nations or of 1800s America is stupid, uneducated, slanderous, or all three at once.  I'm tired of the bullshit people believe about what the Bible says about slavery.  Anyone who objectively examines what the Old Testament actually teaches about regarding the ethics of slavery will find that the Bible universally condemns slave trading, racism, and the abuse of servants.  Biblical slavery is not some nationalistic or racist system that endorses or tolerates cruelty and neglect; it is a system that one could enter into voluntarily (unless one committed certain crimes--see Exodus 22:3) and leave after a fixed period of time, having full legal rights and protection during the entire process.

Of course, moral realists who object to Biblical slavery never have a source of ethics that is both objectively sound and objectively knowable on grounds other than the fallacious emotions of an individual or consensus of a group.  Anyone who makes a moral claim but cannot demonstrate that he or she has sound moral epistemology has no basis by which to even make a moral claim to begin with.  I'm still waiting for people to stop making moral arguments based on appeals to emotion, tradition, popularity, novelty, and authority!  I hope that before long the stupidity of the slavery objection to Christianity becomes apparent and that intelligent people purge this senseless reason for criticizing the Bible from the public mind.